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{ Author Archives } Danny

Nearly Free Speech

I've used 1&1 since I started mucking about on the web; they had a cheap plan for $3/month with one domain name and a simple LAMP stack. But the price has been going up (now $5/month; still comparatively cheap!), and I'm starting to chafe at the limitations (no SSH shell access, proprietary 404 pages, no [...]
2012 02 03 Web Design Comments (0)

New Amazon Advertising API

Just got an email from Amazon reminding me that "As part of our continued effort to ensure that the Product Advertising API is an efficient and effective advertising tool, we’ve identified opportunities to streamline the API", which is their way of saying that the API exists to make them money. Anything that doesn't serve that [...]
2012 02 01 Web Design Comments (0)

Writing CGI scripts

nearlyfreespeech runs with safe mode and safe_mode_gid on, so you can't run shell scripts or other cool things. Usually that's not an issue, but if you do, they let you run CGI scripts, in any of a number of languages. You just have to treat it as a shell script, with a shebang notation of [...]
2012 01 12 Web Design Comments (0)

Things I Learned About .htaccess, part 2

I've learned some things about .htaccess, but mostly I've learned that programming it is deep black magic. The most important thing is "Don't use mod-rewrite unless you absolutely need to". All the fancy stuff is better off done by the PHP (or whatever language you're using) code. Don't do: RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteRule ^([^/\.]+)/$ [...]
2012 01 12 Web Design Comments (0)

Moving the Blog Again

I'm working on moving bililite.com to nearlyfreespeech.net; it's cheaper, more reliable and more hacker-friendly than 1&1. I'll write a post with my experiences and reasons later. But for now just the blog has moved to bililite.nfshost.com/blog, with the plan to move the domain registration for bililite.com to nearlyfreespeech when everything is working and then return [...]
2012 01 08 Uncategorized Comments (0)

Awesome

My office manager gave me this as a Christmas present. I have a great job.
2011 12 21 Uncategorized Comments (0)

Nice Javascript library: underscore.js

Modern javascript provides a host of cool functional-programming toys like forEach and reduce, but I'm stuck with IE* at work, which does not. jQuery fills some of those gaps (it has $.each and $.map) but not everything one would want. Enter underscore.js, which bills itself as "the tie to go along with jQuery's tux." It [...]
2011 12 20 Javascript Comments (0)

New jQuery Plugin: showPassword

I put yesterday's unmask password plugin together with the code to automatically create a checkbox to control it, and removed the dependency on jQuery UI. Download the code. Example <input type="password" id="password"/> $('#password').showPassword('Show Characters as I Type'); Use $('[type=password]').showPassword(string) creates a checkbox as above with string as the label. If the checkbox is checked then [...]
2011 12 13 Javascript
jQuery Comments (0)

Unmask Password Plugin

I hate password masking—hiding what I'm typing to prevent someone from looking over my shoulder at my passwords. I know when I'm in public and when I'm alone in the house, and it should be my choice to actually see what I'm typing, since it has to have some nonsense combination of characters. Even Jakob [...]
2011 12 12 Javascript
jQuery Comments (0)

HTML5 validator plugin

tl;dr Download the code. Use $.validateHTML5(callback), where callback (result, data) is a function that is called with the result, a string that can be "valid" if the page validated, "invalid" if it did not, "warning" if it validated but is "in some way questionable", or "not validated" if some error occurred. data is the actual [...]
2011 12 06 Javascript
jQuery Comments (0)